世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com, in conjunction with JR Tokai Express Research, looked at what people did regarding their mobile phone batteries. They interviewed 337 mobile phone users from their internet monitor group by means of a private internet survey. 79.5% of the sample was male, with 14.8% in their twenties, 35.0% in their thirties, 33.8% in their forties, 13.9% in their fifties, and 2.4% in their sixties.
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goo Research recently published the results of some detailed investigation into the use of portable music players. Over four days at the end of March they interviewd by means of a private internet questionnaire 2,183 members of their monitor group. The respondents were 48.2% male, with 19.1% in their teens, 17.5% in their twenties, 19.7% in their thirties, 21.2% in their forties, 16.6% in their fifties, 4.8% in their sixties, and 1.2% seventy years old or more.

Note that MP3 player refers to either memory based or hard-disk based players only like iPods or D-Snaps, not CD players that support MP3 file formats. I am not sure under what category phones with music playback support are recorded; perhaps they are “Other”?

I’ve recently been testing a Sony NW-A3000 but I couldn’t really recommend it to anyone. The 20 Gb hard disk is nice, of course, but the PC-based software is unwieldy to say the least, as is the player software. Pet hates include that random shuffle seems not as random as it should be, doing Pause then Play will result in a one-second or so skip, and recharging the player resets the player back to the first track. I’ve heard that the iPod balances out the volume, but the Sony doesn’t, so I have to keep fiddling with the sound levels. On the other hand, I did manage to find an almost complete archive of Just A Minute, but on the downside I perhaps scare the other train passengers as I try to stifle laughs during my commute.
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infoPLANT recently carried out a survey into how people used their DoCoMo mobile phone’s default screen display. Over a week at the start of April they interviewed 6,358 people, 65.8% of them female, by means of a self-selecting survey from the iMode main menu.

Note that on the newer models of phones, not just a static wallpaper may be used, but also animations or applets may be set to run on the default display. The Japanese word 待ち受け画面, machiuke gamen is used to describe the wallpaper feature that this survey is concerned with. It refers to the display that appears after the phone has been idle for a few seconds, or perhaps when the phone is woken from sleep mode but before going to menu mode.

My own phone usually has seasonal Pinky pictures with calendar overlay.
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Continuing the recent series of looking at various habits, this time NEPRO JAPAN weighed in with a survey titled “The ease of use of mobile phones”, although the survey looks more at usage habits. They surveyed 4,206 people by means of a public questionnaire available through the iMode, Vodafone live! and EZweb mobile phone sites, for just under a day over the 10th and 11th of April. The self-selecting demographics were 60% female, 3% in their teens, 38% in their twenties, 42% in their thirties, and 17% forty or older. Although this may seem a youth-biased group, the young user is the core demographic they are targetting.

It’s interesting in Q5 that almost half the respondents want to try out a Panasonic phone, versus two in five for Sharp; sales figures suggest that Sharp are the top sellers of phones, but I believe this is because Sharp also sell Vodafone and au-branded phones whereas Panasonic are exclusively DoCoMo.
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japan.internet.com, in conjuction with Cross Marketing, recently investigated mobile phone privacy. They sampled 150 men and 150 women, 16.6% aged 18 or 19, 16.6% in their twenties, and so on up to 16.6% in their sixties.

Note that over three times as many people take their mobiles into public toilets than into their toilet at home. I wonder what is hidden behind that statistic! Im also rather surprised to see that less than a third of all user employ any security locks on their phone; note almost all phones have lock features what require a four digit code to open them. Some of the more advanced phones go as far as having a fingerprint reader that may be used to unlock the device.
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Following on from the recent news about Softbank and Yahoo! buying all the outstanding shares of Vodafone Japan, itMedia published the results of a survey into mobile users’ views on Softbank entering the mobile phone market. The survey was carried out over five days at the end of March and the start of April, with 1200 people responding to a private questionnaire over the internet. The survey group consisted of 400 mobile phone users from each of the providers DoCoMo, au and Vodafone. More detailed demographic information, or where the group of users came from, is not stated.

The most interesting result is that for what people hope fill be the outcome of the deal, in particular regarding call and reception quality. It is a standing joke within the English-speaking community in Japan to call Vodafone “Borderfone” because of the perceived poor quality of reception. This survey shows that this is perhaps a valid criticism, as two in five Vodafone users are looking forward to improvements versus just a quarter of non-users.
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Continuing their recent series of interesting habits that people have around technology, japan.internet.com, in conjunction with Cross Marketing Inc, carried out an internet-based survey to see what email habits people had. They interviewed 300 people from up and down Japan, exactly fifty-fifty male and female, with 16.6% of the sample aged either 18 or 19, and a similar 16.6% aged in each of decades of life from the twenties to the sixties.

Just about all Japanese mobile phones come with graphic smilies (Vodafone even has animated ones, I believe), pre-registered set phrases that include smilies, and smilies in their input conversion dictionaries. For instance, if you type in かお, kao, face, then select the covert to kanji option, as well as the expected kanji 顔, most mobile phones will also present a list of smilies to choose from. Note that this option is also available in Windows – if you have the Japanese IME, select the properties page for the Japanese input method, go to the “Dictionary” tab, and activate the “Microsoft IME Spoken Language/Emoticon Dictionary”.

I do use smilies, or 顔文字, kaomoji, literally “face characters”, a lot in mail, although I usually use the built-in graphics rather than choosing ASCII (and non-ASCII, as is often the case) art. However, as a signature I occasionally do use the Greek characters κεπ.
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NTT DoCoMo recently published an interesting survey they performed to find out what people thought about mobile phone credit cards. They interviewed 1,800 people from all over Japan in February by means of a web-based questionnaire. The sample was exactly 50:50 male and female, and 150 people of each sex from each decade of life, from the teens to the sixties, responded. Note that the teens consisted only of 18 and 19 year olds, though.

First, mobile phone credit cards are just what the term implies – they are mobile phones with a credit card’s contactless RFID chip embedded within them, so instead of your traditional bit of plastic, your mobile phone now becomes the device with which you Chip and Pin.

Note that currently credit cards are not as widely used in Japan as they might be in Europe and the USA. In addition, most shops and restaurants that are part of a chain will accept credit cards (although one of my local supermarkets doesn’t), but independent shops on the whole do not accept them. Note the answers to Q5, where over four in five use their credit card once a week or less, and the perhaps slightly loaded answers in Q7 (there is no indication if the question allowed a free answer or just a selection from a list, with perhaps lower-scoring answers omitted from the results) suggesting that plastic is preferred for luxuries or large purchases.

Overall, I think that this survey suggests that people will see mobile credit cards as an extension of the current mobile wallets, so they will treat them as something to use everyday for even the smallest transactions. From the provider’s point of view, small transactions still have a fixed basic fee associated with them, so charging a bottle of cold tea to your phone’s credit card could cost the retailer up half the retail price in transaction fees. How shop owners can cope with this new threat to their profit margins remains to be seen, and would in fact make a good theme for a future survey.
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Jan Kuczynski let me know about a survey he translated on the colour and ‘feel’ of handsets that people in Japan want. A rather interesting survey that I wish I’d found first. I can’t imagine what a plant-like feel phone would be though!

I also hope that it’s just mobiles that these three women in his logo are holding…

japan.internet.com and JR Tokai Express Research recently conducted a survey to find out about 迷惑メール , meiwaku me-ru, nuisance mail literally, or unsolicited mail, or simply just spam. They interviewed 330 mobile phone owners, 60% male, from all around the country by means of an internet-based survey. The sample consisted of 25.2% in the their twenties, 43.0% in their thirties, 21.5% in their forties, 7.6% in their fifties, and 2.7% in their sixties.

Initially, mobile phones’ email address defaulted to just the telephone number; in fact, when I first came to Japan my phone had no option for even changing the mail address. Now, with the increased awareness (and increased incidence too) of spam, DoCoMo at least (presumably the other carriers do similar things) give new customers a default email address that consists of their phone number plus a few extra random characters to defeat dictionary attacks.

I personally have got zero spam, mainly as I have a user name that is in no Japanese dictionary and I don’t sign up with dodgy sites that might leak mail addresses.
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